It's here: the GIMP 2.8. Its biggest feature is something that many, many people have been requesting for as long as I can remember: single-window mode. No longer do you have to fiddle with a gazillion palette and dialog windows (unless you choose to do so, of course). Great work by the team.

Paint.net basically copy-pasted photoshop's UI with a few tweaks to make it more Windows-ish*. Ditto for Paint Shop Pro. While Pixelmator's authors have taken a more original approach with floating windows and such, they still follow many of Photoshop's design decisions, such as separating tool options from tool selection or using tiny icons that are a pain to target with a pen tablet.

Now, it is arguable that Photoshop have set conventions in UI design for raster image editors, and that any software that ignores those will deserve the hate it gets from users of other softs who have to re-learn lots of things. But here, we are talking about UIs being superior to each others, not simply different and thus hard to switch to. And I'm ready to argue that GIMP's UI makes a lot more sense than Photoshop's in several areas, just like Photoshop's makes more sense than GIMP's in other areas.

For a deeper analysis of the original post...

Judging by the screenshots, not much has changed in the UI department, aside from the single window mode (about f--king time). When this is mentioned, die hard fanboys usually like to point out that their window manager is better than yours, but this is not the point - the point is that some people like their applications to be contained in a single window and don't appreciate the way old GIMP barfs windows all over the desktop.

I'm just as happy as you to see single-windows mode coming to GIMP, but that comment does have some irony to it coming from a Pixelmator user, isn't it ?

First of all, GIMP is OK for amateur work. Most people don't need the full might of Photoshop to crop a picture or do some light editing on their vacation photos. But if you are a professional, GIMP's feature set is underwhelming to say the least.

And those alleged huge holes in GIMP's feature set will never, ever be mentioned again.

Aside from that the UI looks and behaves really crappy. It looks exactly like you'd expect of an interface made by programmers. The palettes are big and clunky, too much padding in some places, too little in others, ugly icons, some controls are so big that even in their official screenshots, palettes have both horizontal and vertical scroll bars and so on.

Lots of subjective adjectives, but not so much meat here. The only issue that is precise enough that you could turn it into a bug report is that the UI does not scale well when window width is reduced.

Please just raise some money and hire a professional UI designer to overhaul everything. I know, I'd donate a few bucks for that cause, and I suspect a lot of other people would, too.

And... That's another fail. Why you like to quickly dismiss GIMP's UI as something made by developers with no taste, please take some time to learn about Herr Peter Sikking, who's been working on GIMP's UI for... say... years ? http://blog.mmiworks.net/

Another place to learn about his current work on GIMP is here : gui.gimp.org/index.php/GIMP_UI_Redesign

The fact is that most professionals already use Photoshop, but I don't think that they'd mind, instead of paying hundreds of dollars for CS6, to switch to GIMP 2.10 or 3.0 for free, but you have to give them something good to switch to.

Oh, really ? Just put professional Cubase and Logic users together in a room and give each group the task to convince the other group to use "their" software. I promise I'll help with cleaning up the blood.

The more effort you've spend into something, the harder it is to switch to something else. Especially when that something is an income source, and when productivity losses caused by learning a new software directly lead to professional issues.

No sane person would complain that the controls are laid out differently or that they have to learn a new UI. I'd do that for the $600-700 that Photoshop costs. Pixelmator's great success speaks volume about people's willingness to learn something new when it's good. Having said that, the UI in CS5 is absolutely incredible. It was not always this good, but now the bar is raised pretty high. I understand that the GIMP team doesn't have Adobe's resources, but, GIMP developers, just copy that pixel for pixel if you aren't able to make an equally good one.

I just wish that the GIMPshop people would take it a step further and not just rearrange the menus.

Again, no extra argument to complete the poor list given earlier. You just state more directly than before that what you want is a free clone of photoshop.

To clear the air, I want to mention something: that's right - I'm complaining about software people make in their own free time and no, I don't have the time, skills and willingness to contribute a single line of code to their project. I assume that since they release it to the public, aside from the joy of programming it, they also get a kick when the result of their work is successful and appreciated. So don't give me any of that open-source crap about how you should take what's given to you and STFU, because the developers are doing it only out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it, because 1) they have a hobby and 2) because they want to be appreciated. So in a sense, I'm doing my part for open source - I'm using it and ranting, trying to give people ideas to make it better.

And in the end, you're rambling imprecisely on an obscure website about OSs and patents, which is not likely to help in any way. Ever heard of bug reports and mailing lists ?

Unrelated: some prude politically correct pricks are also bothered by the name. They say it hinders adoption in big companies. Meh ...

It's just too easy to make jokes on names, so I won't go there

* This is a design mistake IMO, because people will naturally assume that stuff that looks the same will behave the same and be frustrated when it turns out that it doesn't.